GRADUATE HUMANITIES FORUM KEYNOTE

Old Histories, New Itineraries
Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies, New York University

Cosponsored by the National Museum of American Jewish History

Thursday, 22 February, 2007
5:00 – 6:30 pm

Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum
3260 South Street, Penn campus

Event free and open to the public.

Among the deepest motives for travel is the need to grieve and to commemorate loss. Not surprisingly therefore, Jewish visitors to Poland have focused on sites of the Holocaust. Eminent scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett asks how this situation may change once the thousand-year story of the Jews in Poland becomes widely available in the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a cultural achievement fraught with controversy in post-Communist Poland.

Suggested Reading

Homepage, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

Her bio published by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. University of California Press, 1998. (JSTOR.)

Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust, B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett with Lucjan Dobroszycki. Schocken, 1994 (accompanied by exhibition and feature documentary film).

History of Jews in Poland, Wikipedia.

Rainer Mahlamaeki, Finnish designer of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.